Currently, I am afraid, only with a complete database restore. We have some work in progress to create a ‘trash’ system but it ain’t there yet I am sorry to say…

OUCH!

This will delete every forum post, every blog post, every comment, every user in the site and in general every change that took place after the backup of the database?

Can I restore only the forum’s database?

You could try just restoring the sfposts and sftopics tables (which will still lose every post & tropic made since the backup was made). There may well be other knock-ons that I have not considered however and generally I would not recommend it.

This topic had over 11000 posts…

And what is the irony? I knew that the “delete this topic” option of the toolset was very dangerous and was trying yesterday to remove it without success and planned to ask here today how to do it.

One week ago I had copied (by ftp) whole the httpd folder. I suppose it does not include the database as well… Correct?

No – the database is completely separate.
The ‘delete’ tool does ask for your confirmation…

Yes, but I thought I had clicked the “delete this post” option.

So now I have an old database backup. What could I do to get the less possible damage?

If I create a second forum inside my site, can I restore sfposts and sftopics tables in that forum without touching the original one?

1100 posts in one topic?  Wow.

No, you can only have one forum per site.

How much activity have you had since the deletion??  Easiest thing to do is restore that backuo and lose recent stuff.  If lot, that is problematic.

Issue is you need more than just topics and posts table. There will be some manual steps either way.

We still have it on our list to add a tray feature so even if you confirm the deletion you still have another check.

No 1100. 11000 This topic was 5 years old.

In my forum I have only a few topics and I never (intent to) delete them. The users do not have permission to create a new one, so every activity takes place inside these few topics.

My biggest topic is 34000 posts strong for example. The topic I deleted was the second biggest one.

The backup is much older than the deletion, that’s why a complete restore is not an option.

I’m thinking to create a subdomain, restore there my old backup, delete everyting but this topic and link this specific topic to my original site. Could that work?

What else could I do?

yes – I see no reason why you could not do that. Sub-domains are no problem.

What I was getting at yesterday is that after you clicked on the toolbox menu to delete the topic, you must have also then said OK to the confirmation dialog – it is a two stage process.

Ah – 0ne word of caution. Always remember that if you create a new sub-domain the database name has to be different to the original, still existing database. Depending on how you decide to restore the old DB it may try and create a new database with the same name. That will fail or even overwrite your current one. Unlikely but something to bear in mind.

And I can’t stress enough. Everyone running a website with a database needs to make regular backups. Weekly is probably the minimum frequency with which it should be done.